“Look who’s here,” Barry said. “I knew you couldn’t pass up the Tuesday tapeworm special at Carver’s.”
For once I wasn’t up to it. “I need access to your cloud, or whatever it is you call it.” I told him what I was after and what I’d been up to. It didn’t take as long as I thought.
“I can’t leave you alone for a minute,” he said. “Yeah, I’ve got it; also Cops, America’s Most Wanted, 60 Minutes, 48 Hours, Crime 360, and two hours to kill before my tea with Frankie ‘Big Neck’ Siciliano. Step into my parlor.” He slid away from the door.
He was in his back-to-basics period, sub-leasing a condo on the ground floor of a building where they used to build Liberty ships on the Short Cut Channel of the River Rouge. The current owner had whitewashed the bricks and replaced the big gridded windows with solar panels, but there was still a slight tinge of soldering compound in the air. That part might have been just my imagination; it would be a week before my nasal membranes recovered from eau de O.K. Corral. I followed him into a combination living room/office/sleeping chamber big enough to dry-dock a destroyer, with exposed overhead pipes and steel beams painted a neutral shade that made them recede into the fifteen-foot ceiling. The décor, eighties duck-and-basket, screamed previous tenant; decades after Barry had turned an ignition key and blown a quarter of his anatomy to smithereens, he still lived on the principle that nothing he owned couldn’t be left behind on three minutes’ notice.
Six sticks of dynamite ought to have cut in half his trip to Paradise, but some amateur had taped them to the heat shield instead of under the hood. Barry owed his life to Detroit steel.
I looked around with my hands in my pockets. A tin reproduction of an old-fashioned sign advertising overalls read WEARS LIKE A PIG’S SNOUT. “How do you stand it?”
“The roof don’t leak and I’ve got a honey of a view of Zug Island.” He sat down on a rocking chair in front of a rustic table and swept the screen saver off a desktop computer; this season it was a cheesecake photo of Virginia Hill, Bugsy Siegel’s squeeze. “Pull up an orange crate,” he said.
The choice wasn’t much better than that. I slid a sling-back thing of canvas and bleached maple up to a corner of the table.
His fingers were a blur on the keyboard. The screen scrambled and a hellish mix of electric guitars, electronic synthesizers, and French horns burst from the pocket-size speakers. He ran down the volume until the ceiling beams stopped vibrating. Grainy, jagged black-and-white images stuttered across the monitor at opposing angles, a disorienting effect: SWAT teams boiling into action, fugitives in flight, suspects slung across fenders and cuffed, cars in hot pursuit; the seamy life as seen through a detached retina. A thud, as of a steel door slamming shut, followed by a close-up of a CGI-enhanced Doberman, red-eyed and foaming at the mouth, and ragged blood-red letters making a gory slash across the screen:
CUTTHROAT DOGS
Snarling, the dog seized the legend in its jaws and shook it to pieces. Then the image dissolved into a close-up of a stern, vertically pleated face. Superimposed on this, in simple block characters, orderly and reassuring:
Your Host
Chester Goss
Barry waited, fingers hovering above the keyboard.
I said, “I need to surf through every episode going back five years.”
“That’s all?”
“To start.”
“Frankie Big Neck might spot me fifteen minutes, but not twelve hours.”
“Goss runs a recap at the end of each season. That help?”
“I wish you’d said that in the first place. I was kidding about the fifteen minutes. He’d squiff me after five.” He pressed a key, brought up a grid that looked like a menu from a Chinese restaurant, scrolled down Column A, found what he wanted, tickled another key. When the orange came back on, he fast-forwarded to Goss’s face—just as stern, but less pleated by five years—paused on a subhead reading THE YEAR IN REVIEW, then proceeded through the episode, first jumping ahead chapter by chapter, then slowing to frame by frame when I called out, on to the acknowledgments at the end of the entry; a longer list than usual, crediting all the officers and agencies who’d cooperated over the past season. I made a rolling gesture with my hands and we sped to the recap for the next year.
We kept at it for an hour and a half, freeze-framing from time to time on a face that looked promising, then whizzing forward. At the end of each episode, a number appeared, each numeral sliding into place as on a digital alarm clock, reporting the latest tally of felons brought to justice as a result of information volunteered by viewers reporting the whereabouts of featured criminals. Even allowing for the flimsiest connection to the material provided by the show, the total was impressive.
Chester Goss had hit on the formula for success when it came to crime coverage: Every day, the media furnished a bounty of atrocities, and averaged only a handful of arrests and convictions per month. Cutthroat Dogs reported a nearly 100 percent record of cases closed, and closed for good. It didn’t matter that his staff would select its cases based on the likelihood of imminent apprehensions; a punchy narrative style, rapid-fire editing, and a dramatic musical score kept the audience riveted, with no time to stop and consider the realities or appreciate the meticulous, relentlessly patient process of tracking fugitives, placing them under restraint, and assembling a case that would satisfy first a prosecuting attorney, then a judge, then a jury—all comprised of error-prone humans—and eventually a penal system built on shifting shale. Success at snail’s-pace didn’t win ratings.
“What a guy!” said Barry, pausing to work the cramps out of his fingers. “Sherlock Holmes, Eliot Ness, J. Edgar, and McGruff the Crime Dog all rolled into one. Shows what any of ’em could’ve done if they’d just had a smart producer. Notice how there’s never any mention of the appeals system? I bet half these mooks either walked or ratted out their friends for eighteen months of community service.”
“He said he peddles justice for a living. One unsolved investigation and he’s back behind the cutting desk in Southfield.” I lit a cigarette off the butt of the last. “Ready when you are, B.S.”
“Watch your mouth. What makes you think your guy’ll show up?”
“He’s like an itch I can’t reach. I was wrong in thinking we’d met face-to-face, or even across a busy street. I didn’t know that for sure until just a little while ago. I’ve got Stan Kopernick to thank for that.”
“Seems to me last time was for a sock on the jaw.”
“You know what they say about last year’s enemy. How’s your carpal tunnel, all better?”
We were less than halfway through the third season-ender when I leaned forward fast, releasing a shower of sparks onto my shirt. I brushed them off, not quickly enough to avoid burning a hole in the pocket. “Go back!”
He reversed the footage. When I told him to stop, he froze on a narrow face captured from above, staring into a ceiling-mounted surveillance camera. It had no moustache, but it belonged to the man I’d spotted in my building and on the street and finally the slab of meat on the floor of the house on Hastings. It was stamped with the time and date from the original airing. I had Barry go back to the beginning of the segment and play it at normal speed.
The man’s name was Kenneth Whitelaw. As summarized by Chester Goss in his trademark hypnotic monotone, two notes deeper than his normal speaking voice, the Georgia native had an arrest record going back to age fourteen, including aggravated assault, armed robbery, breaking and entering, and attempted murder. All but one of the charges had been withdrawn; the assault and murder attempt when the witnesses refused to cooperate with authorities and the armed robbery because the judge who’d authorized the search warrant that had recovered the stolen property from his home had omitted an important piece of punctuation from the language. The B-and-E stuck; his face in the security footage was impossible to challenge, and he was sentenced to thirty-six months in the Georgia state penitentiary at Atlanta.
“I saw this episode,” I said, “or maybe the one that broke the story. I didn’t remember the details, but certain facial types stay with me. According to this he should still be inside.”
Barry snorted. Not many can pull off a snort the way he can. “Reversed on appeal. Good behavior. Escape, possibly. Mistaken identity?”
“Not unless he’s twins.”
“Unlikely coincidence. Keep going? Goss might have followed up.”
“Not in the case of a crook getting released back into the population. He told me himself he wouldn’t still be on the air if he couldn’t deliver punishment every week.”
“‘Reality programming.’” Air quotes. He tapped his mouse. Whitelaw disappeared and Virginia returned. Barry sat back. “What tripped your breaker? It’s been five years since this guy got into showbiz.”
“Kopernick.” I told him about the towel. Barry’s forehead wrinkled as far as the plate in his skull.
“When did he discover science? Last I knew he was a confirmed witch-burner.”
“That’s probably why he gave it to me. Who’d take it seriously, coming from him?”
“He didn’t tell you where he got it?”
“He probably wants me to confirm it first. Two mistakes less than a year apart don’t get you a parking spot next to the precinct entrance; he told me so himself. Anyway, I know where he got it. It’s Goss’s.”